Director, star wrestle with challenging Sam Shepard play

Joe Meyers

Published 3:16 pm, Tuesday, February 19, 2013

A mix of gritty domestic drama, jarring sexually charged scenes and dreamy surreal moments, Sam Shepard's 1978 play "Curse of the Starving Class" still has the power to enthrall and perplex audiences.

The comedy-drama is running through Sunday, March 10, at Long Wharf Theatre and marks the first staging of a Shepard play at the nationally renowned New Haven venue.

For director Gordon Edelstein, it has been a chance to work on his favorite Shepard play, while for actor Kevin Tighe, the show allows him to draw on his own roots in the desert areas west of Los Angeles, where Shepard has set so many of his stories.

"It's a tough play but it is also a very funny play," Edelstein said in an interview before the first preview last week.

"It's one of those plays that is very hard to get right ... to pitch it just right," he added of the mixture of seemingly incompatible elements in the script -- the hilarity and tragedy that bump up against each other in the lives of the wildly dysfunctional Tate family.

"If you get it wrong, it just doesn't fit together," Edelstein said. "It is its own thing ... but if we can get them to laugh in the first 20 minutes, I think we'll be OK for a lot of the strange stuff at the end of the play.

"How an audience reacts depends on their willingness not to think rationally. A character like Willie Loman (in `Death of a Salesman') can be seen realistically in terms of your life and mine ... but some of (Shepard) just cannot be explained in any logical way," the director added.

Tighe said the danger for actors playing Shepard is to focus on the realistic moments in the play at the expense of the writer's deliberately absurd departures from "real life."

"You have to beware of naturalism, which is the place actors tend to go into," Tighe said. "You have to leave the ground for awhile and then hope you land."

For the actor, the play has been a chance to return to Long Wharf, where he worked with Edelstein on a 2002 production of Eugene O'Neill's "Mourning Becomes Electra," starring Jane Alexander.

Edelstein said he was delighted to have Tighe work on the Shepard production "because he understands the West in his bones. He's a funny guy, but he's a serious intellectual, too ... a very serious reader."

Tighe said that as soon as Edelstein mentioned the play to him, "I kind of went, `Yeah,' right away. ... To a certain extent the play reflects my upbringing, so there's an inherent familiarity for me. I had a father who was very invested in living in the desert. He would be there one moment and then gone the next and you never knew where."

Although Tighe is best known for his work on dozens of TV shows and films, his roots are in the theater, and he said that Edelstein reminds him of the late, great New York theater figure Joe Papp.

"He reminds me of Joe in terms of his energy and his intelligence. Gordon has an acute understanding of actors that (leads you) to trust him completely," Tighe noted.

The actor laughed when I suggested that his wild 1989 cult classic "Road House" had a mix of realism and absurd comedy not unlike Shepard's world view.

"I've gotten more comments on that movie than any other film I've ever done," he said, adding that he is constantly amazed by its broad audience appeal.

"Working class people like it, (college kids), white people, black people. I think a lot of that is due to the music ... the movie had great music," he said of the contributions of Jeff Healey and others to the tale of outrageous violence in a small Missouri town after a businessman, played by Tighe, decides to remake a rundown road house into an upscale bar.

"The movie was made during a writer's strike, so we did it without any writers there to correct us," he said, adding that no one realized how much screwball humor was in the movie until they saw the finished version.